Strategies of Containment

But more and more people are now breaking free of these strategies of containment. A look at the historical record and the experience of our day-to-day reality show we've been kettled with lies. It has become obvious that capitalism can't produce long-term prosperity for its workers. Its profits must continually increase, and it has three ways of generating those: exploiting our labor by paying us less than the value we have added to the product; innovating new ways to lower costs; expanding their markets. Now that these last two methods are approaching their limits, the exploitation must increase to produce the required profits.

Liberal prosperity was a feature of the Keynesian phase of capitalism, a 30-year bubble of better wages that occurred only in North America and Europe when it was necessary to stimulate consumer demand. But those conditions are gone and can't return. The world market has become more important than the home country, and selling there requires low prices, which in turn requires cheap labor.

We're now in the consolidation phase of capitalism, when global competition eliminates the less effective predators and wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer giant corps and the rest of us become their vassals. We have to overthrow this barbaric system and build a humane one or face an increasingly degraded life.

To direct this struggle successfully, we need a political program based on the lessons of history and a strategy for implementing it. We need a militant base within the working class that can defend workers independently of the unions. We must break decisively from the Democratic Party, that graveyard of social movements. We need media that inform the working class rather than delude it. And we must do all this internationally, coordinating our efforts with workers in other countries to build democratic socialism, where the people decide how the economic life of society will be organized. When the resources and productive capacity of the world belong to its people, they can use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners.

This is the challenge of our time, an historic battle for liberation. It's an enormous job, but no more difficult than other evolutionary changes humanity has mastered. The best program I've found for building this economic democracy is the Socialist Equality Party's: http://www.wsws.org .